Graph 1 shows the density of Georgian farmers’ revenues received from selling their produce, generated from the sample of 3,000 Georgian rural households. (For the motivation and methodology of our study, please refer to the article that was published here last week. It is also available online on the ISET Economist Blog: “Dumb Farmers Do Not Grow Big Potatoes”, by Florian Biermann and Ruediger Heining).

We first met Gogi Elanidze in winter 2015, when interviewing farmers in Rati’s village, Kvemo Alvani. Located in Akhmeta municipality, Kvemo Alvani and its twin, Zemo Alvani, are not your usual Kakhetian villages. The two serve as the winter base for the people of Tusheti, an isolated valley separated from Kakheti by the 3000m high Abano mountain pass.

This week, the Georgian public was shocked when a gross lack of competence and aptitude among the country’s teachers was unveiled. As DFWatch.net reports on March 10th (quoting a Georgian source), of the 10,552 teachers registered for a competence check that took place in January, only 6,477 showed up in the first place, and of these, only 1,101 passed the test.

As a freshwater resource-rich Caucasian country, Georgia is well-positioned to produce high quality trout in its mountains. However, the Georgian trout sector is struggling and faces a number of constraints to further development.

On February 8, 2016, ISET hosted a workshop on Private Sector-led Agricultural Extension in Georgia. Organized by ISET in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture, this workshop brought together chief executives of selected Georgian agribusinesses as well as representatives of the donor community, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Ministry of Education and Science to discuss the possibilities for Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) for developing effective agricultural extension services in the country.